The Impossible Question : Part 5

How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle - How the World's Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers
by William Poundstone

(Page 5 of 6)

Ambady repeated the experiment with five-second clips of the same teachers. Another group of raters judged them. Their assessments were, allowing for statistical error, identical to the ratings of the people who saw the ten-second clips.

Ambady then had another group view two-second clips of the same teachers. Again, the ratings were essentially the same.

The shocker was this: Ambady compared the video- clip ratings to ratings made by the students of the same teachers after a semester of classes. The students knew the professors much better than anyone possibly could from a silent video clip. No matter - the students' ratings were in close agreement with those of the people who saw only the videos. Complete strangers' opinions of a teacher, based on a silent two-second video, were nearly the same as those of students who had sat through a semester of classes.

It looks like people make a snap judgment of a person within two seconds of meeting him or her - a judgment not based on anything the person says. Only rarely does anything that happens after the first two seconds cause the judger to revise that first impression significantly.

All right, but the raters in this study were volunteer college students. Who knows what criteria they used to rate the teachers? Who knows whether they took the exercise seriously?

A more recent experiment attempts to treat the hiring situation more directly. Another of Rosenthal's students, Frank Bernieri (now at the University of Toledo), collaborated with graduate-student Neha Gada-Jain on a study in which they trained two interviewers for six weeks in accepted employment interviewing techniques. Then the two people interviewed ninety-eight volunteers of various backgrounds. Each interview was fifteen to twenty minutes, and all the interviews were captured on tape. After the interview, the trained interviewers rated the subjects.

Another student, Tricia Prickett, then edited the interview tapes down to fifteen seconds. Each fifteen-second clip showed the applicant entering the room, shaking hands with the interviewer, and sitting down. There was nothing more substantial than that. You guessed it - when another group rated the applicants just on the handshake clip, their opinions correlated strongly with those of the two trained interviewers who had the full interview to work from.

This would be funny if it weren't tragic. These studies suggest that the standard job interview is a pretense in which both interviewer and interviewee are equally and mutually duped. The interviewer has made up her mind by the time the interviewee has settled into a chair. Maybe the decision is based on looks, body language, or the "cut of your jib." What's certain is that it's not based on anything happening inside the job candidate's head. The questions and answers that follow are a sham, a way of convincing both that some rational basis exists for a hiring decision. In reality, the decision has already been made, on grounds that could not possibly be more superficial.

Human resources experts categorize interview questions with terms such as "traditional" and "behavioral." Traditional questions include the old standards that almost any American job seeker knows by heart. Where do you see yourself in five years? What do you do on your day off? What's the last book you've read? What are you most proud of?

Traditional-question interviews walk a tightrope between concealment and disclosure. They often invite the candidate to say something "bad" about himself, just to see how far he'll go. These questions seem to be about honesty. Really, they're about diplomacy. What you're most proud of might be your comic-book collection. That's not necessarily what the interviewer wants to hear, and you probably know that. There are safer answers, such as "the feeling of accomplishment I get from doing something - it could be anything - really well." The trouble with the traditional interview is that both sides are wise to the game. Practically everyone gives the safe answers. The interviewers nod, not believing a word of it.

This has led to the rise of behavioral questions. These ask the candidate to describe a past experience bearing on character and job skills. An example (used at Microsoft) is "Describe an instance in your life when you were faced with a problem and tackled it successfully." Another is "Describe a time when you had to work under deadline and there wasn't enough time to complete the job." The rationale for asking behavioral questions is that it's harder to fabricate a story than a one-liner.

Unfortunately, traditional and behavioral interview questions do almost nothing to counter the two-second snap judgment. These are soft, fuzzy, and ambivalent questions. Rarely addressed is what you're supposed to make of the answers. It's mostly gut instincts.

Ask yourself this: "Is there any conceivable answer to a traditional interview question that would cause me to want to hire someone on that answer alone? Is there any possible answer that would cause me to not want to hire someone?" I guess you can imagine alarming answers that might betray the candid psychopath. But most of the time, job candidates give the cautious and second-guessed answers everyone expects. With half-empty or half-full logic, an interviewer can use any answer retroactively to justify the first impression. Rarely does an answer challenge that first impression. This probably makes some interviewers comfortable. It may not be the best way to hire. It is far from clear that traditional and behavioral questions are a good way of spending the always-too-limited time in a job interview.

Copyright © 2003 by William Poundstone

About the Author

William Poundstone is the author of nine books, including Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, Prisoner's Dilemma, Labyrinths of Reason, and the popular Big Secrets series, which inspired two television network specials. He has written for Esquire, Harper's, The Economist, and the New York Times Book Review, and his science writing has been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Los Angeles.